Refraining from Worshipping False Gods

שבת שלום

The Torah portion for August 11, 2018, is רְאֵ֗ה, which is Deuteronomy 11:26 – 16:17. This portion reiterates commandments for taking care of the poor and the strangers among us. It also spells out once again the laws of kashrut, or keeping kosher, laws which are intended to keep the Children of Israel separate from the surrounding peoples. The expectation was that this could reduce the temptation to worship other gods, because it’s harder to mix with other peoples if you can’t eat together with them.

The one sin that seems to be the most reprehensible in the entire Torah is praying to other gods. It could be the easy path – all the people around you are doing it, and there are temples and mechanisms and festivals and idols – idols being visible, tangible representations of a god. This is in contrast to God as worshipped by the Children of Israel, who has no form of any sort, cannot be seen, and in fact is not even permitted to be represented visibly. Nor is anybody allowed to say His name except for the High Priest under extremely special circumstances (in the Holy of Holies, on Yom Kippur, and after a significant purification process).

It can be so tempting to worship a god whom you can see and touch and who demands far less of you than does the God of Israel. It is very seductive to be like everybody else around you and engage in a ritual that might seem meaningful – I dance before this idol, I burn incense before it, and then the rains will fall and my crops will grow.

There is a lesson that can be taken from this portion for us today. We are so easily tempted to turn aside from the difficult path of righteous behavior, so easily seduced into instant gratification and immediate rewards. We can play on social media all day long, shop to our hearts’ content, buy and eat treats, or engage in gossip about somebody when others around us are doing so. As human beings, we are not wired to forego immediate pleasures while working diligently toward a long-term goal way off in the future. But in my opinion, the easy, immediate pleasures that divert us from our paths – of good behavior, of working toward optimal health, of saving for the future – are equivalent to being distracted by other gods rather than worshipping the one God whom we have been commanded to serve. We can each think of those idols in our own lives who tempt us away from the path we would prefer ourselves to follow when we sit down and think seriously about the future and the person who we would like to become. Let’s try to watch for these side-tracks in our own lives before we succumb to them. That is probably a worthwhile practice to get into as we approach the beginning of the month of Elul and the upcoming holiday season.

כן ׳ה׳ רצון